Month: April 2017

The blockchain business space is convex. By convex I mean that the businesses developing in the space are either large organizations, or small startups. The space looks a little like the graph below.

This isn’t necessarily good or bad, it just is. On the right of the graph you have very large organizations, like Accenture, Microsoft, and IBM. On the left you have companies like Monax, Ripple, and Coinbase.

Given the relative newness of blockchain technology the distribution of companies into two peaks, one of small companies and one of large companies, makes sense. Large organizations have the resources to test out new ideas without too much disruption to their business. On the other side, small companies have the agility, and often exclusive competencies, to try and build businesses around new ideas.

On the flip-side, the blockchain user space looks similar to the blockchain business space. The early adopters are largely very small users (e.g. individual holders of bitcoin), and large enterprise institutions. The chart is effectively the same as that for the business space.

Until a “killer app” for blockchain is developed the chart above will not change, and widespread adoption will not exist. For widespread adoption to actually exist the blockchain user space will have to look something like the chart below.

When midsize and small organizations are using blockchain, say a trucking company in southern Illinois or a local grocer in Argentina, then blockchain can be considered to have made it, but that is a long way off.